Aug 23, 2013

During the 1920s, Herman Sorgel, a
German architect, proposed creating a dam across the Strait of
Gibraltar, turning the area into a massive hydroelectric plant,
creating enormous amounts of renewable energy. A natural byproduct
of the dam would be to drain much of the Mediterranean Sea by
restricting the flow of water into it. The idea was to create much
new land for Germany to grow into. They called the project
Alantropa.

During the early 1900s, many German leaders were espousing a
political science theory called Lebensraum, literally “space of
life.” Lebensraum advocates argued that overpopulation required a
solution, and that solution should simply be to acquire more space.
While the easiest and most straightforward way to spread is to take
over the land of others, there could be another way, to create new
land. Doing so would require a public works project larger than
anything the world has ever seen, like draining the Mediterranean
Sea.

Sorgel’s top objective was to stem the flow of water into the
Mediterranean and over time, the water level would drop, creating
more inhabitable land in both Southern Europe and Northern Africa.
Low-lying lands would emerge basically everywhere, as hundreds of
square miles of habitable space would be reclaimed from the sea.
Europe and Northern Africa would, effectively, merge.

The Atlantropa Project’s support was strongest toward the end of the
1920s and into the 1930s, but waned as Hitler rose to power and in
1942, the Nazis banned Sorgel from publishing his plans further.
Atlantropa was dead.